John Paul II: The Superpope

Twenty-five years ago he was the action man Pope - an athlete, a skier and a tireless missionary for the Roman Catholic Church. Now he is the wheelchair Pope, barely able to speak, too frail to move. But while the flesh is weak, he rules with a will of iron

Beneath the celebrations in Rome last week of Pope John Paul's 25th anniversary has been a sadness. Inevitably people cast their minds back to the moment in 1978 when it was announced that a pope from Poland had been elected, and the man himself addressed the waiting crowd so confidently in Italian - "your ... our language", he said to them, making a deliberate slip.

He was an athlete, a skier, used to hiking with his students through the Tatra mountains in Poland. He was also a philosopher, a dramatist, a linguist, a poet. He might have been an actor, and on the world stage he could play to perfection the enormous crowds who came to see and hear him. Now, here in Rome 25 years later, he was reduced to "human fragility", as he acknowledged in a homily that he began and ended, but which mainly had to be read for him.

This is now a wheelchair papacy, and a pope who can hardly speak, yet who still considers himself bound to the commission that was laid on him. "Lord, you know that I love you," he said movingly, repeating the words of St Peter to Christ. The homily was understood by some to be a last will and testament, but it was rather a pledge to carry on till his last breath.

It has been a remarkable quarter-century. "Open wide the doors for Christ," he said in his inauguration sermon. "To his saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilisation and development. Do not be afraid." It was a new note. The Roman Catholic Church was on the march again. In Eastern Europe, oppressed nations heard those words with eager anticipation, and they were not disappointed.

In his first return visit to his native country, in 1979, the Polish Pope showed for all to see that the Communist hierarchy were cardboard figures, reduced to insignificance as he took the country over. The assassination plot against him in 1981 failed, and in due course Poland became the first domino to fall in the amazing collapse from within of the Soviet empire. Of course Ronald Reagan's technological challenge, which the Soviets could not meet, played its part, but the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev later confirmed in an interview that nothing in Eastern Europe would have happened as it did without the Polish Pope.

John Paul now hoped that light would dawn from the East. The martyred Christian nations of Eastern Europe, in association with the Orthodox Christians, particularly of Russia, would cleanse and refresh the tired churches of the West in return for Western expertise in operating in pluralist industrial societies. It has not happened. His approaches to the Orthodox were rebuffed, and an alarmed Pope saw Western capitalist permissive culture making inroads even into his beloved Poland. In response, he has emphasised that freedom without truth degenerates into licence. What sort of freedom do you want, he asked Poles during his fourth visit there in 1991, shouting in anger. "Freedom for what? Freedom to take the lives of unborn children?"

He has denounced what he sees as "cultures of death", developing against them a consistent pro-life ethic that stretches all the way from condemnation of war to repudiation of capital punishment to reinforced opposition to artificial birth control. He has been the great critic of the Western ethos. In the Latvian capital, Riga, warning his audience against the recrudescence of a "savage capitalism", he went so far as to remind them of "the kernel of truth in Marxism".

It has been prophetic, and it has won him respect and admiration in many quarters, but in Europe the applause has been for the singer, not the song. Europeans want to be modern in their own fashion, and while many have quietly renegotiated the terms of their church membership, too many others have walked away. The European "apostasy", as it is known in Rome, has clouded the Pope's achievement - his huge success in Africa, his testimony to human rights in every continent, his interfaith initiatives, particularly towards the Jews. Despite all this, he has seen disaffection in the lands that have been the cradle of Christianity and the source of its diffusion in the world. "I have sounded the trumpet," he is reported to have said to a Polish friend. "Why have they not followed?"

Towards his own church he has been an iron-willed pastor. He has faith in its structures and its beliefs. The task is not to change them but through them to penetrate in freedom to the limits that are allowed. The scandal of clerical sexual abuse is, for him, a symptom not of defective structures and discipline but of an infidelity that requires those same structures to be tightened. To almost every suggested church reform his answer has been "no". "I am not severe - I am sweet by nature," he is quoted as saying in a homily in Rome. "But I defend the rigidity principle. God will always have the last word."

Bishops who have canvassed the ordination of married men so that the people in their dioceses could have more priests to bring them the Mass have not been heard. One of them, Remi De Roo, mooted it to the Pope during lunch. With his fork in one hand and his knife in the other, the Pope smashed his fist on the tabletop. "God will provide," he cried. "God will provide."

This is a superpope and, inevitably, the other bishops have been put in the shade. The Second Vatican Council, which met in Rome from 1962 to 1965, first under John XXIII and then under Paul VI, envisaged that the church should be governed by a team - the college of bishops - with and under the pope. But in this papacy the emphasis has been always on the captain, and the papal civil service, the Curia, has tended to usurp the bishops' role. "We know the theology all right, that we are vicars of Christ in our diocese," Archbishop Keith O'Brien of St Andrews and Edinburgh, who will be made a cardinal this week, told journalists in Rome in 1999. "But some of the bishops who are in Rome do not think that," he added, referring to the Curia.

Popes are free to govern as they wish, however. It has been John Paul's conviction that he had to impose strong central control, to prevent the huge multinational of a billion people that he governs from flying apart under the pressure of the centrifugal forces released after the Second Vatican Council's reforms. Crucial for the future will be how his successors view that policy.

As to the papacy itself, he has broken the mould. He has been no "prisoner of the Vatican", quite the contrary. Like St Paul, he has been an evangelist driven to the ends of the earth - "Woe is me if I do not preach the Gospel." The popes who follow him will have their own styles and strategies, but they will be aware of the stamp that he has put on their office.

He is very probably a saint. Saints can be hard to live with, however. Their message is uncomfortable: to be fully human, compromise is not enough, you can go higher, you must go higher. That is what, in the end, Pope John Paul II will be remembered for.

The writer is editor of the Catholic weekly 'The Tablet'